The Codex App
openai.com644 points by meetpateltech 14 hours ago
644 points by meetpateltech 14 hours ago
It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mostly just chat apps, which are not particularly difficult to code from scratch. Before the usual excuses come about how it is impossible to build a custom UI, consider software that is orders of magnitude more complex, such as raddbg, 10x, Superluminal, Blender, Godot, Unity, and UE5, or any video game with a UI. On top of that, programs like Claude Cowork or Codex should, by design, integrate as deeply with the OS as possible. This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.
>This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.
Who told you that? You can write entire C libraries and call them from Electron just fine. Browser is a native application after all. All this "native applications" debate boils down to the UI implementation strategy. Maintaining three separate UI stacks (WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK/Qt) is dramatically more expensive and slower to iterate on than a single web-based UI with shared logic
We already have three major OSes, all doing things differently. The browsers, on the other hand, use the same language, same rendering model, same layout system, and same accessibility layer everywhere, which is a massive abstraction win.
You don't casually give up massive abstraction wins just to say "it's native". If "just build it natively" were actually easier, faster, or cheaper at scale, everyone would do just that.
It baffles me how much the discourse over native apps rarely takes this into consideration.
You reduce development effort by a third, it is ok to debate whether a company so big should invest into a better product anyway but it is pretty clear why they are doing this
There are cross platform GUI toolkits out there so while I am in team web for lots of reasons, generally it’s because web apps are faster and cheaper to iterate.
>You reduce development effort by a third
Done by the company which sells software which is supposed to reduce it tenfold?
The situation for Desktop development is nasty. Microsoft had so many halfassed frameworks and nobody knows which one to use. It’s probably the de facto platform on Windows IS Electron, and Microsoft use them often, too.
On MacOS is much better. But most of the team either ended up with locked in Mac-only or go cross platform with Electron.
I guess it shows how geriatric I am with desktop app development these days, but does no one use Qt anymore? Wasn't the dream for that to be a portable and native platform to write GUI apps? Presumably that could abstract away which bullshit Microsoft framework they came out with this week.
I haven't touched desktop application programming in a very long time and I have no desire to ever do so again after trying to learn raw GTK a million years ago, so I'm admittedly kind of speaking out of my ass here.
This is another common excuse.
You don't need to use microsoft's or apple's or google's shit UI frameworks. E.g. see https://filepilot.tech/
You can just write all the rendering yourself using metal/gl/dx. if you didn't want to write the rendering yourself there are plenty of libraries like skia, flutter's renderer, nanovg, etc
Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
You will be outcompeted if you waste your time reinventing the wheel and optimizing for stuff that doesn't matter. There is some market for highly optimized apps like e.g. Sublime Text, but you can clearly see that the companies behind them are struggling.
>Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
I see complains about RAM and slugginess against Slack and countless others Electron apps every fucking day, same as with Adobe forcing web rendered UI parts in Photoshop, and other such cases. Forums are full of them, colleagues always complain about it.
Of course they complain about them, but those are the users, not the purchasers.
How are Adobe and Slack/Salesforce doing?
Are they hurting for customers?
the people that USE the software the most are not the people BUYING the software. it’s why all enterprise software has trash UX.
do you think i as a software engineer like using Jira? Outlook? etc? Heck even the trendy stuff is broken. Anthropic took took 6 months to fix a flickering claude code. -_-
McDonald’s isn’t hurting for customers either. Doesn’t mean their food is anything a chef ought to aspire to.
McDonald's is renown for speed of service, a bit ironic to compare that to slow apps
Not seeing complaints doesn't mean they don't exist. Not to mention ui latency that is common in electron apps that is just a low-level constant annoyance.
That just means your feedback system is trash if it fails to surface such an obvious and common pain point in user experience. Tough that's an extremely common state of feedback systems. But also, the general computer knowledge isn't that high for every end user to connect some sluggishness in another app to your app wasting ram and causing disk swaps, that eliminates a lot of end user complaints
> reinventing the wheel
what exactly are you inventing by using a framework "invented" decades ago and used by countless apps in all those years?
I have complained about literally every Electron based app I have ever used. How would you know there are no complaints?
There are complaints and then users keep using these super popular and bloated apps. Techies make it seem like bloat is a capital sin but it isn't.
I don’t complain about Electron because I didn’t install the app if I could avoid it.
Even with SublimeText, most popular IDE is VSCode, most popular interface design tool Figma, all popular chat platforms and so on are all electron based. If people were desperate for faster platforms they'll be migrating to them.
> Even with SublimeText, most popular IDE is VSCode
What a weird comparison, one is free, another one is a premium app, of course a lot of people prefer some suffering over paying money
Your mistaking supply-side path dependent outcomes that produce a lack of consumer choice with consumer preference. No consumer prefers slow, bloated, non-native software, but they're stuck with what they can get.
There is competition for Figma. Sketch.
There's plenty of competition for VSCode too.
Don't forget that these Electron apps outcompeted native apps. Figma and VSCode were underdogs to native apps at one point. This is why your supply side argument doesn't make any sense.
> There's plenty of competition for VSCode too.
But there isn't, not if you include all the extensions and remember the price